Did you said Soul Jazz?

Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often the organ trio which featured the Hammond organ. Important soul jazz organists included Bill Doggett, Charles Earland, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Les McCann, “Brother” Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Lonnie Smith, Big John Patton, Don Patterson, Shirley Scott, Hank Marr, Reuben Wilson, Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond Smith.

Tenor saxophone and guitar were also important in soul jazz; soul jazz tenors include Gene Ammons, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Eddie Harris, Houston Person, and Stanley Turrentine; guitarists include Grant Green and George Benson. Other important contributors were Alto saxophonists Lou Donaldson and Hank Crawford, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and drummer Idris Muhammed (ne Leo Morris). Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves, melodies, and melodic hooks.

Soul jazz was developed in the late 1950s, reaching public awareness with the release of The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco, and was perhaps most popular in the mid-to-late 1960s, though many soul jazz performers, and elements of the music, remain popular. Although the term “soul jazz” contains the word “soul,” soul jazz is only a distant cousin to soul music, in that soul developed from gospel and R&B rather than from jazz.

Some well-known soul jazz recordings are Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder (1963), Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island (1964) (which was popularized further when sampled by US3 on Cantaloop), Horace Silver’s Song for My Father (1964) (which was musically alluded to by Steely Dan with Rikki Don’t Lose That Number), Ramsey Lewis’sThe In Crowd (1965), and Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (1966) (also popularized further when covered as a top 40 pop song by The Buckinghams).

The Soul Jazz vernacular was a major contributer to the evolution of Jazz-Funk in the 1970s.